


lay yourself down (and dig your grave)

by darlingargents



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Darkest Night 2018, F/M, Forests That Try To Eat You, Making Out, Mindfuck, Nature Which Tries To Eat You, Teen Romance, Treat, Vines, Weird Forest Magic, a bit of, in which derry wants to play with its food, mentions of pennywise and related amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-14 16:25:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16044143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: The forest is awake, and it’s toying with them.





	lay yourself down (and dig your grave)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_Creative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Creative/gifts).



> This prompt got into my head in the best way and I just had to write it.
> 
> Title from Sleep On The Floor by The Lumineers.

Bev is trembling like she’s been hit with a gust of freezing wind, but she hasn’t. Richie is sweating in the heat, a bead of it sliding down the side of his face, his glasses a little clouded. It’s dark, but hot enough that he feels like he’s inside an oven.

The forest is awake, and it’s toying with them.

He pulls Bev closer. He can’t remember, now, why they’re here — in the Barrens, in the early hours of the morning. He remembers the night. They’d all gone out for pizza, all the Losers. Bev had been back in Derry, just for a couple weeks. He’d offered to drive her back to her motel in his beat-up, piece of shit truck — he’d paid for it himself, two summers of working all the time — and as she’d laughed and hopped in, her red hair — so much longer now, it had been brushing the ridge of her collarbone as she’d eaten pizza — had swirled around her like a halo, shining in the dim light in his truck, and he’d thought,  _ fuck _ .

He’d thought nothing would come of it other than him having yet  _ another _ fucking unattainable crush, but then she’d asked him to pull over just off the road and climbed into his lap and kissed him like she was drowning and he was air. She’d tasted like lipgloss and pizza sauce and she was so soft and warm that he was melting into her.

And now Richie can’t remember how they got here, in the woods in the middle of the night. He can’t remember if it got further than his hands sliding up under her shirt and unhooking her bra. All he can remember is feeling like he was blinking, and opening his eyes and finding himself here.

The forest shouldn’t do this, he finds himself thinking as he reaches, desperate, for Bev, who’s further away again. Wasn’t he holding her? He grabs her wrist and holds on tight. Her skin is slippery with sweat and she’s still shaking, her eyes wide and glassy and reflecting moonlight. The forest shouldn’t do this. It’s not the forest that’s the problem with Derry, it’s — it’s the clown—

The thought vanishes like mist. Bev’s wrist is vanishing from under him, and he grabs for her again, pulling her up against his chest. He can feel her heart hammering, and he can hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

Distantly, like it’s happening on another planet, he feels something wind around his ankle. Something thin, cutting into the skin of his leg, under his jeans. The pain is distant, but it’s enough for him to realize that something is really, really wrong.

“Bev,” he says, gasping out her name, “we need to — we need to run—”

She looks up at him, but before she can speak, whatever it is around his ankle tightens, and he screams as it cuts down to the bone. And then it  _ pulls _ . He goes crashing down on his back, and he’s holding onto Bev so tightly that she’s dragged down with him, landing on top of him and pushing all the air out of his lungs.

Something wraps around his other leg. He looks down and chokes back a scream. It’s  _ vines _ , which should be green but are a dead-looking dark brown and dripping in something dark and glistening. His blood.

Bev scrambles off him and stumbles back a few steps, but before she can get anywhere she backs into a tree. Before Richie can shout a warning, a vine has come down and wrapped around her throat. Her scream is cut off as it digs in and drags her down to her knees.

The vines are all around him now, climbing up his legs under his jeans, carving into his arms. One lashes out and wraps around his neck, just like Bev. He can hear her struggling to breathe, to stand, and he knows, suddenly, throughout his whole body, that it’s too late. They’re going to die here.

He tries to speak her name, but when he opens his mouth, a vine goes in, wrapping around his tongue, diving down his throat. It’s  _ consuming _ him, eating him alive. He’s sinking into the dirt. He reaches out his hand, trying to find Bev, but she’s too far away. The adrenaline that might’ve kept him alive is dying in his veins.

His glasses are cracked. He has a moment to worry that he can’t buy a new pair before one of the vines slides into his lungs, ripping and tearing them apart, pushing his ribs to the point of snapping. He tries to scream, and his tongue is pulled out.

He tries to scream again, and—

Falls.

He’s lying on the forest floor. It’s freezing. His body is intact. Bev is beside him, her face pale with horror, arms wrapped around her chest. She looks, for a moment, like she’s about to cry, but she pushes it down, her throat moving as she swallows.

Richie finds himself running his hands down his chest, over and over. He can still feel his ribs snapping, can still feel his lungs being shredded like wet paper. He touches the roof of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. Both still intact.

“What just happened?” Bev says, her voice low but still sounding too loud in the eerily silent night. “There were vines, they were inside me, they were in my body—”

“I don’t know.” Richie’s voice is raw. From screaming? Not from the vines. The vines were never there. “I don’t know, but we need to — we need to fucking leave, Bev, right now.”

“Yeah.” She stands, wobbling a little, and Richie does too. His glasses aren’t cracked. He won’t need to replace them.

“I know where we are,” he says, because he does; they’re not far from the road, maybe five minutes if they stick to the path. He takes Bev’s hand, because he can, and she doesn’t pull away.

As he moves away from where they’d been standing, he looks back for a moment and, between blinks, there’s a corpse lying there, broken glasses askew, and then it’s gone again. A vine, on the ground next to his foot, twitches.


End file.
